Paula Schwartz – Bitch Flicks

Things I Learned About Rocker/Poet Patti Smith at Tribeca Film Festival Talk Series

Rock legend Patti Smith and Oscar-nominated actor Ethan Hawke shared stories and ideas about process, acting and writing Thursday afternoon at the SVA Theater in Chelsea to kick off the Tribeca Film Festival talk series. Here are things I learned about the rocker/poet, who is a fascinating raconteur who had a packed audience spellbound.

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

Here are things I learned about the rocker/poet, who is a fascinating raconteur who had a packed audience spellbound:

How she came to co-write “Cowboy Mouth,” a one-act play with music with Sam Shepard:

Sam and I wrote this play cause we had this relationship which we shouldn’t have because he had a small kid, a family. We were young, and we knew we had to end our relationship even though we liked each other so much, (so) we wrote this play sort of as our swan song… (He said) let’s stop crying and write a play.

I said, ‘I don’t’ know how to write a play.’ Sam said, ‘You’re the girl and I’m the guy… Just do what I say…He writes a little set up and then he says something and he hands me the typewriter so I just answered him, and we wrote out a whole play that way and then he thought we should perform it… Sam at the time was sort of like a big deal, so we got to do the play at American Place Theater and there was a part in the play where Sam wanted us to have a battle of language…We battled with language.

How Smith learned to improvise:

Sam improvises his language, and my character is suppose to improvise back, and I said, ‘How do we do that? What will I say?’ … He said, I’ll say stuff and you’ll say stuff back to me, any kind of rhythm and poetry… ‘What if I make a mistake?’ He said, ‘It’s improvising! You can’t make a mistake. If you lose a beat then you invent another beat,’ and that made perfect sense to me. And that little instruction and then doing a play with him I learned how to improvise, which has served me my whole life in everything I do. It was one of the greatest lessons I ever got was from Sam.”

Smith likes getting awards:

It’s really fun to get like accolades. I’ve gotten awards from the French government. I love my medals, and I do I really I get in the swing of it. Somebody wants to give me a medal, I’m really happy. But really the only real success is that success that you know when you’ve done something well, when you finish a poem or you do a certain performance and you know you’ve done a good job.

Gregory Corso and Smith’s first poetry reading:

Of the beat poets, Gregory Corso was the youngest… Gregory had intense energy and he was also very academic as well as being one of our greatest poets… We would go to poetry readings. I was only 20 years old. They don’t have poetry readings in South Jersey… A lot of these poets go on and on… I have to say it was kind of boring… I just sat there quietly… Gregory goes, ‘Shit, shit, shit… No blood, get a transfusion.’…and I was like, ‘If I ever do a poetry reading it can’t be boring, Gregory will cream me.

So I did my first poetry reading in St. Marks in 1972. I was talking to Sam Shepard, and I was telling him I’ve got to deliver. I have to do something that will transcend boredom and Sam said, ‘Play a guitar because a lot of your poems have a lot of rhythm.’ I asked my friend Lenny Kaye, and I asked him if he could play like car crash sounds or feedback and things to the poem and stuff like that, and he did and it caused quite a ruckus and Gregory wasn’t bored.

Smith’s work habit rituals:

I write in the morning usually for a few hours, since I was about 10, almost every day. If I don’t write I feel agitated. I’ll write in a bathroom or a train. I just feel the need always to write something. When I was younger I would stay up all night or smoke a little pot and write… I would sit all day typing on the typewriter but once I had children, once I had children, a baby, I couldn’t do that, I had to redesign and redefine my work time and so I started waking up at 5 in the morning – this was in like 1981 — and from 5 to 8 when my husband and baby were sleeping that was my time to write. That’s when actually really developed a certain work ethic.

How Smith went from being a poet to a performer:

I started out writing poetry, which is a very solitary discipline, drawing, painting also, and I never wanted to be a performer really, but through writing poetry and performing it I evolved into being a performer and then having a rock and roll band but it was not a planned thing. It was nothing I aspired to so it was evolving right in front of me but it was evolving and the people were part of the fabric of that evolution. I would never have done that by myself because I was a solitary worker… I think that’s the one thing that makes me a little different from other musicans, other performers or other rock and roll singers. I’m really of and from the people as a performer. I feel we’re all part of the same fabric I just never would have done it. I wouldn’t have found it on my own. I didn’t even aspire to it.

Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from The Artist. Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.

In ‘Difret,’ Executive Producer Angelina Jolie Puts Spotlight on Horrors of Child Marriages

Angelina Jolie executive produced ‘Difret,’ a drama based on the true story of a 14-year-old Ethiopian girl, Hirut, who is kidnapped in her rural village by a much older man and kept captive as his future bride. When Hirut, played beautifully by Tizita Hagere, fights back and accidentally kills her captor, she faces the death sentence, as dictated by tribal law.

Difret producer and director at the 2015 Athena Film Festival

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

Angelina Jolie executive produced Difret, a drama based on the true story of a 14-year-old Ethiopian girl, Hirut, who is kidnapped in her rural village by a much older man and kept captive as his future bride. When Hirut, played beautifully by Tizita Hagere, fights back and accidentally kills her captor, she faces the death sentence, as dictated by tribal law.

The abduction of young girls by much older men who make them their wives is a cultural tradition in rural villages in this part of the world, as is the death penalty for Hirut’s so-called crime. But a tough, steely lawyer, Maeza (Meron Getnet), from the women’s legal aide practice takes on the case and fights for her client’s life. The movie also works well as a thriller and procedural courtroom drama with twists and heart-pounding reversals. That the story is based on a riveting true story gives the movie a timeliness and urgency that makes it understandable why Jolie, who directed In the Land of Blood and Honey, about the plight of women abused and raped during the Bosnian War, has attached her name and support to the film.

Difret is written and directed by Zeresenay Berhane Mehari, who was born in Ethiopia, but raised in Virginia, and is produced by Mehret Mandefro. The two married while shooting the film in Ethiopia. Difret closed the Athena Film Festival in February, and the director and producer brought along their two-year-old son and seven-week baby to the screening and Q&A moderated by Athena Film Festival co-founder Melissa Silverstein.

Following are selected highlights from the Q&A.

How did you get the movie made?

Mehret Mandefro: I’ve been working on it for over five years. I joined this project in 2009 … I started this project in 2007 technically. Zeresenay is a classically trained filmmaker and went to film school. I’m actually very non-traditional in my background. I’m a physician by training … I came to film through the back door. And about five years ago, I was speaking at a health and human rights conference, and Zeresenay was pitching his script to some NGOs.

He had exhausted his possibilities in Hollywood. The script was actually incredibly strong, so people had offered to buy it in Hollywood, but they wanted it done in English. They also wanted Hollywood actors, and Zeresenay had a very specific vision of the film to do it in Addis Ababa, cast it locally, which meant it took longer. But thankfully, when he brought it to me, I read the script, and it was such a page turner, and I was already very interested working on kind of women’s issues that I was like, “Oh, I know how to raise money for this. We’re going to do it.” So I actually started. I was producing the film before I married him, before we had babies and all that, so we joke that we had twins actually … I was pregnant with Lucas when we went into production, and Mena came along this year.

Difret producer and director at the 2015 Athena Film Festival

What was the inspiration for this script?

Z: By chance really. I met Meaza Ashenafi by chance … In 2005, I was in Ethiopia working on a documentary, and I was at a friend’s house, and her brother said, “You should make a film about my sister.” Like yeah, sure, why not? I didn’t know who she was and didn’t know about that organization that she started. By the time I met her, she’d helped more than 30,000 people, women and children … She was a judge and left her seat because she thought that the country was ready to move forward in human rights, so she started working with the constitution commission … From a filmmaker’s standpoint, that is a very interesting character, and you can already imagine what kind of difficulties that she’s going to face, so I was already locked in on that and then started reading about the organization, and it was amazing, so I found this story, and I left home in May 1996 to go to school, and this particular case happened literally four or five months after I left.

And it was also the organization’s biggest case then or since, and it kind of put the organization on the map, but it also was the first time that the country as a whole had a conversation about tradition, and that was my entry point. Another very strong subject matter to tackle is this tradition. My true point is always the characters and the struggles that they face.

Shooting in Ethiopia must have been intense, especially since you shot in some of the rural villages. Describe shooting some of those scenes.

Z: When we were doing the abduction scene with the horses, we rented the horses from the village and we had particular riders because we wanted to do it in a certain way, and also, there were insurance issues, and we didn’t want to be liable, and then so they went, “You guys are doing it wrong.” So they literally wanted to get all the guys, the professional riders that we brought from the city to ride the horses, and they wanted to show us themselves how it’s done.

So they showed you how they abduct girls?

Z: Right. See you have to understand because in their context, in that traditional context, it’s not something that’s bad. It is part of life. It happens there, and so it’s part of who they are.

How did you find your female leads? The little girl never acted before, so how did you guide her through the most emotional scenes?

Z: The lawyer, played by Meron Getnet, is a classically trained actor and had been in 10 or 11 movies before we got her, and she had two or three television shows and was taking her masters in theater … With Tizita Hagere, we got lucky. Two weeks before we shot, we had almost given up, and we weren’t going to shoot at all if we didn’t have the right person to play her because she is the core of the film. She has the emotional trigger that goes on through the film, and so, it’s too much to ask for a young person to play that, right? So you kind of have to find that person already born with those elements. She was 13 when we cast her. And I knew that I didn’t want to overwhelm her, so I didn’t give her the script. So we started working on a daily basis. And I would tell her exactly what happened for that scene. And so I’d tell her what happened before it, and then what’s going to happen after. So we would have a conversation, not about her, but about the character, Hirut. That is a real person. So she kind of felt like she got to know her as a friend, so she always talked about the part as a third person, so it’s not about her. She’s actually emulating somebody else’s story, which helped us because you can see when you talk to her. Most of the takes were first or second takes.

How did Angelina Jolie happen to become an executive producer for the film?

M: After really working hard to try and raise the money, we actually had the finishing cut and it was a month before we were going to premiere it at Sundance. And you know we were sitting there, and there were all these amazing films that get made and don’t really get out there, and so we were talking with one of the executive producers, and said, “Wouldn’t it be great to try and, like, get somebody,” and actually our executive producer was like, “You know, I know someone who knows Angelina; this is so up her alley, let’s try it.” Me and Z were like, “Whatever.” We were so tired at that point.

We sent the cut of the film and literally didn’t think anything of it and literally like a week later, she called us. We were sitting on a porch, and she called Z and was like, “Hi, it’s Angie. I love your film.” You know? And she’s been amazing. Like kind of opening doors and making sure. You know, a foreign language film about Africa. I mean this is a very hard market in America to try and get this film seen, so having her name totally helped in terms of, like, helping profile and just getting it known. She’s actually been a wonderful ambassador. She took it with her to the Global Seminar on Sexual Violence last June in England and had a screening with dignitaries in the U.N. She’s on the cover of Ms. Magazine this month actually talking about our film and the campaign that we’re doing about child marriage, so she’s been a true angel and so supportive of the film. It’s been awesome.

Difret opened October 23 at Lincoln Plaza in Manhattan.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz4NbqGeEZQ”]

Raunchy and Unfiltered, Amy Schumer Talks About ‘Trainwreck’ at the Apple Store

She’s gotten into hot water for political or cultural reasons because of some of her jokes recently:

As I’ve been having more eyes and ears on me, I realize that I have more of a responsibility. Even like a musician gets bigger, like, little girls look up to you; you can’t be showing your asshole at an awards show. They’re like, “No, it’s not my fault they look up to me!” I’m like, okay, people are listening to me, and my words might hold weight for some people, so I’m not going to do that stuff anymore. I haven’t done jokes like that for a couple years.

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

“Don’t tell them I said this, but sometimes they’re smug at the Genius Bar,” Amy Schumer told the audience last week at the Apple Store in SoHo to talk about her new movie, Trainwreck, which she wrote and in which she stars. Directed by Judd Apatow, Schumer plays a young career woman who is commitment phobic because her father (Colin Quinn) told her and her sister as children that “monogamy is unrealistic.” Even more unusual for female leads in film, her character unapologetically likes sex.

“Hey guys, were you just in the neighborhood? Did you come here for this or what? On purpose? Okay, cool,” Schumer told the standing-room only crowd.

Trainwreck opened Friday and earned 10.7 million at the box office by the next day, another example of the fallacy that films with female leads can’t make money.

Following are highlights from Schumer’s raunchy and hilarious conversation at the Apple store.

On whether she always knew she was funny:

AS: I was always making people laugh, but I didn’t think it was a good thing. It kind of bugged me because it felt like they were making fun of me, but it was explained to me—I did a production of Sound of Music when I was five—as Gretel…

Every time I would come onstage, people would laugh, and I would cry. And the director was like, “No, it’s great if people laugh. That means they love you, and you made them happy,” and I was like, “Oh.” But yeah, people would laugh, and I embraced it. So my sister would dress up like princesses and like, characters that already existed. There was always one bite missing out of all the apples in our fridge, ‘cause she would be like Snow White, take a bite of it. We had a glass coffee table and she would lay under it until somebody like, came and kissed her. And I would just make up these like, strange Eastern European characters. I was like, “I’m Madame Levitschky, come see me and I’ll tell your fortune,” and I don’t even know where they came from.

Whether she’s the same in person as her character on her Comedy Central’s show Inside Amy Schumer:

AS: No, I’m not. I’m like Daniel Day-Lewis. I leave here, and I put on a top hat and I garden, and that’s me. That’s what I picture he does. Yeah, no. The difference is, I am a little bit of an introvert; I get overwhelmed in crowds and don’t get like, really wasted that often. I did this week, but it was because I was in Akron. (Trainwreck premiered last week in Akron, Ohio, the hometown of LeBron James who also appears in the film.) Like, what are you going to do there? Yeah, I don’t have sex very often. Hopefully that’s going to change. Can I just also say—somebody tried to hack me because they assume I have lots of naked photos, but joke’s on them because I have never put my face in them, and I haven’t taken them for like, ten years because I’m aging. They sent this detective guy over to my house this weekend to help me secure all my shit, and they knew him, they’re like, “We’re sending this guy over to you,” my business manager, and he got there, he buzzed, I didn’t even brush my teeth, and I rolled out of bed. He was so hot. Like, wouldn’t you give your friend a heads-up? You’re like, “Okay, just know that this guy coming to your house, is like, so hot. You’re going to want to at least brush your teeth. Just something! Just do something!”

How she and Judd Apatow came to make Trainwreck:

AS: The movie started because I met with Judd, and we kind of came armed with an idea just in case. We did a meeting and he was like, “Well, if you ever have an idea, the door’s open,” and I was like, “Well, I have an idea,” like, seize the day. I’m a lot like Christian Bale in Newsies. Um, I for some reason cannot do an interview without mentioning Newsies. I don’t know what it is. But, open the gates! No, that idea I wrote, it was a little broad.

Then he was like, “What’s going on with you right now?” And I was falling in love, so the story was happening. I wasn’t enjoying it. I was just scared. And you’re like, chemically altered when you’re falling in love. It’s not even fun; you feel sick. You feel sickened. And you’re just scared about what you’re going to find out about the other person or that they’ll catch you in a bad light, like in Clueless, “Did I stumble into some bad lighting?” So my references are very updated. I’m at the cutting edge about every movie. Remember that ice skating one? Chemistry! But um, then we made the movie! Next question! No, I wrote scenes. Scenes in no order, and then Judd and I would kind of—we would write out the beats. Oh, you see her in the office and talk to her dad. And I wrote a draft pretty quickly, in I think a little over a month. I’m just a psycho. I go under and do it.

She wanted to write a character who had a lot of sex and was not judged for it, which is not a thing we typically see in movies with women leads:

AS: I feel like with my standup, I’ve done this kind of [thing] where I’ll talk a lot about sex a lot, but just because it’s funny, not because I’m so much of it. I’ll always say—and I mean—I love the show Sex and the City like everyone else, but the character of Samantha, I didn’t experience her as the “fun one.” If my friend was behaving like that, I’d like, take her to the hospital, you know? And I don’t think, I’m not like, “You should be able to fuck as much as you want, and you love it!” I think that’s nuts. Yeah, it’s a self-destructive thing to do. I would say when I was a sophomore in college that was my behavior. I was in so much pain, and I had lost all of my self-esteem, and I was like, “I’m just going to not get attached to one guy and I was like, maybe I’ll be the girl that sleeps around.” I tried that, and it was horrible. Just like when you break up with someone and you’re younger, and you’re like, “I’m going to sleep with someone else,” you’re in so much more pain than you would’ve been in. But then there’s this other thing where—I’ve mostly been in long relationships, and in between them, I’ve slept with a person or two, and I like to tell stories about it onstage because something ridiculous or awful always happens. So just from a woman being onstage talking about sex, I’m saying things like—there’s a kid here. Do you want to maybe earmuffs this part? I’m just recommending that to you, I don’t know your parenting technique, but I say, like, I’ve had anal, no one’s ever come on my face, that’s true, but just saying those things and broaching those subjects, people are just like, “Oh, she’s the sex girl. She’s a whore, bet she’s down to fuck,” and it’s like, no, I just want to talk about it. And so I’m really proud of what we were able to do with this movie because I think you learn a lot about someone rather than just a snap judgment of like, “That girl’s slutty.” You’re like, “Oh, well this is where this is coming from, and this is what’s going on with her.” So I hope people leave it a little less ready to judge a woman who’s sexually active outside of wedlock or in order to conceive a child.

On shooting her first sex scene:

AS: Did you guys watch the show Delocated? Jon Glaser’s show? It was on Adult Swim. My first sex scene was with Eugene Mirman, and he was supposed to be losing his virginity to me. We were supposed to be wasted, and at the same time he’s having his first orgasm, he finds out that his dad died, so he’s kind of like, scream-crying and drooling and coming, and I’m under him. I was trying to make him comfortable because he was shy, and I was like, “Oh my god, don’t worry,” and whatever, and then I was like, “He’s comfortable,” and then when it—I was walking down the stairs at the end of the shoot day and I was like, “My acting teacher told us some days you’d just be playing the girl who gets fucked,” and then when I went to the premiere party for the episode, I’d been fully cut out. Like, you could tell that somebody was getting rammed, but you couldn’t tell that it was me. It was like, “Oh yeah, we’re on Adult Swim, we’re not allowed to show that.” And I was like, “Did you maybe think about not shooting that? Maybe a body pillow would’ve been cool?” But the sex scenes in Trainwreck were easier than that. Most of them.

Asked about all the prep work she must have done for Trainwreck:

AS: That sounds like I fucked a lot.

On keeping a balance in writing and acting in emotional scenes in the film that are also funny:

AS: There’s nothing that makes me personally feel more vulnerable than having a person that I’m attracted to and interested in in front of me, telling me they like me. Because feeling deserving of love has been a definite obstacle that I was going through when I was writing this movie. I go through it all the time. So there’s another scene where he says that he read some of my stuff, and you know, if somebody’s like, “I read your [work],” you’re just like, can I become a puddle on the floor? I was feeling really vulnerable in that scene, and especially, I went into that scene just thinking, I’m going to tell him that it’s over and he’ll be like, “Okay, cool!” He really threw me off my course. It was fun to be surprised by someone. You know, that’s rare.

How does she find the courage to be so damn funny?

AS: Um, just ignorance. Yeah, I don’t know. I think something’s wrong with me. I’ve always been an asshole.

She’s gotten into hot water for political or cultural reasons because of some of her jokes recently:

AS: I’ve gotten very famous lately, you guys. It’s very weird, it’s very new. And when that happens, you’re kind of treated like a politician, like little Ariana Grande, is like, publicly apologizing for eating a doughnut. But it’s like, all of a sudden, “Where do you stand on capital punishment?” You’re like, “What? I have a lower-back tattoo.” So when I started out, I was telling jokes that were racist, and I was really good at writing them, against everybody. Everybody got some. Part of my thing was to play kind of a really irreverent idiot, and that was a character. I was a character onstage all the time. Now I talk like myself a lot more. In my hour special, I was starting to be more of myself, but I still had some jokes in there; they were a little shocking, and it didn’t look like I was going to say stuff like that, and I got a good response from it. As I’ve been having more eyes and ears on me, I realize that I have more of a responsibility. Even like a musician gets bigger, like, little girls look up to you; you can’t be showing your asshole at an awards show. They’re like, “No, it’s not my fault they look up to me!” I’m like, okay, people are listening to me, and my words might hold weight for some people, so I’m not going to do that stuff anymore. I haven’t done jokes like that for a couple years. If I think of a great one, I’m going to say it to my friends. So I don’t regret any joke I’ve ever told; I don’t apologize for my jokes. They got me where I am today, and it was all very worth it. You know, I feel a little bit naive, and I feel silly. I kind of thought that I could maybe bypass that. I was like, “Can we maybe not do the thing where you guys burn me at the stake for some miscommunication? Can we not do that? I’m a comic.” And they were like, “No. This is how we do it.”

How she deals with the backlash:

AS: I was not surprised about that stuff, and I’m just going to do my best with it. I learned from my friends, who are successful comics and actors, not to answer back, not to address it. And I wish I could, because I love communicating. I love having an open door, and if someone asks me a question or if they’re offended by a joke, I’d just like to say, “What was it? Let’s talk about it.” But yeah, it’s just been explained to me that you can’t answer. So that’s like, a sad new thing.

While she has this public attention, she wants to talk about things that matter to her, especially progressive feminist ideas:

AS: I’m just going to try to use it for good. But nobody’s going to be perfect, you know, and it’s like, if I’m doing 90 minutes of jokes and everything’s funny and you’re laughing, and I say one that hits a little too close to home for you, of course you have a right to be offended by that one thing; you can feel however you want, but like, what about the rest of the time? Is that fair to say, “Well, I don’t like you now.” If you don’t like one song, do you stop listening to that musician? There’s just more pressure on comics now, but I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing always and saying stuff that I think is funny. You know, just more and more it’s about injustice and things that I think are unfair. I also just like dumb jokes still, just stupid shit. Yeah, I’m handling it the best I can, and if some arbitrary fact, something happens, and I wind up having to take the fall for it, I feel like it’s totally out of my hands.

Natalia Tena and Director Carlos Marqués-Marcet on Feminism, ‘10,000 km,’ and Long Sex Scenes

Marqués-Marcet just finished editing Hannah Fiddell’s next film, ‘Six Years,’ a relationship drama, due out this year. “I love working with females,” he told me.

“My crew was actually 80 percent female. But it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to get women.’ I was just getting the best people. I don’t care if they’re women or men. In this case, it just happened to be mostly women. If they are the best, that’s how it is.”

David Verdaguer, Natalia, and Carlos Marques-Marcet

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

Carlos Marqués-Marcet’s romantic drama 10.000 km opens with a long take–lasting maybe 25 minutes–of an attractive couple making love. Living in a dark, cramped apartment in Barcelona, Alexandra (Natalia Tena) and Sergi (David Verdaguer), both in their early 30s, have been together for seven years. While they have sex, they talk about having a baby. Afterwards, the couple carries on with their normal routine; they drink coffee, eat breakfast, discuss their careers.

The 32-year-old Spanish director and his co-stars–the only two characters in the film–turned up at the New York premiere last week at the Museum of Modern Art for the screening and a Q&A. I spoke with them on the red carpet and the after party at 11 Gattopardo on West 54th Street.

As everyone else melted in the hot weather, which Natalia Tena laughed was “f…king boiling,” the actress looked cool and glamorous. “I’m Spanish, so I love this weather,” she told me. She was born in London but is the daughter of Spanish parents. She is best known as Osha in Game of Thrones and as Tonks in the Harry Potter films Deathly Hallows.

I asked the actress about shooting the opening scene, one of the few times she is physically together with her co-star.

“It’s actually the kind of sex scene that makes you cringe because it’s very real,” she told me. “It makes you uncomfortable because it makes you feel like a fly on the wall, you know what I mean? Whereas other sex scenes in films … it’s kind of like montage. This isn’t really that sexy. It’s a bit weird.”

Tena and her 10.000 km co-star, who improvised much of their own dialogue in the film, did prep work to feel comfortable with each other. The director “made both of us choose music and do strip teases, which was interesting,” she laughed, “so we would know each other physically.” They also created backstories for their characters. “We improvised, talked about how we met, talked about our first kiss, deciding to have a kid.”

Tena and Verdaguer’s characters are young but not that young; they are at an age where their career prospects are narrowing. Sergi, who is practical, is studying for exams to get a teacher’s license. As an ex-pat Brit, Alex has it harder finding a job as a photographer. When Alex receives an offer of a yearlong residence in a Los Angeles gallery, which Sergi didn’t even know she had applied for, he tells her of course she must go. For Alex, this may be her last chance at a career she loves, and she grabs it. Their baby dreams take a back seat.

10,000 kilometers is the distance from the dark, messy Barcelona apartment to the even tinier, very white flat Alex moves to in LA. The film takes place in only two locations with only two people. After the opener they are together only through virtual communication–Skype, e-mails, texts, and Facebook. Often seen only as discombobulated heads on a computer screen, they laugh, joke, argue, and cry.

Long-distance relationships are nothing new, but the movie asks if virtual communication can keep modern love going, or is it just as likely to hasten its dissolution? Sergi asks Alex about the photograph on Facebook of her friends and the man she didn’t tag. Who is he? There are fewer secrets, but it’s also easier to misread a situation or uncover a lie.

On the red carpet, when I asked why Marqués-Marcet chose this as the subject for his first feature film debut, the director said, “It’s a modern relationship and changing a lot, and it’s a story that’s been told in many ways, long-distance love, but I thought it could be told in a different way.”

Asked if it was based on a personal experience or story, he said, “It’s the sum of many things. Spain is a country with 50 percent unemployment for young people. It’s very, very hard to get a job, so part of it was portraying this reality of people who have to live under these conditions. Economy has had an effect on everyday life and on our relationships.”

As for having only two characters in the film, the director said, “It just evolved that way. We realized that the most touching and strong moments involved the two of them, and so we kind of stripped down everything else,” he said.

“The funny thing is people don’t feel like they are missing anything else. The idea was trying to contain it so you have this off-screen space for them, like in real long-distance love where you don’t know what’s happening on the other side.”

One of the best things about the film is that for a change it’s the woman who leaves for a better career. I asked the director, who co-wrote the script with Clara Roquet, if he was a feminist? “I’m against patriarchy that’s for sure,” he replied.

“I think the role models have changed. The film is just showing a reality. I’m surrounded by women who leave their homes to pursue a professional life, more even than men, so to me it’s more than just a gesture but portraying reality. Films should portray that reality more often.”

Marqués-Marcet just finished editing Hannah Fiddell’s next film, Six Years, a relationship drama, due out this year. “I love working with females,” he told me.

“My crew was actually 80 percent female. But it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to get women.’ I was just getting the best people. I don’t care if they’re women or men. In this case, it just happened to be mostly women. If they are the best, that’s how it is.”

10,000 km feels modern and doesn’t have the familiar female tropes and stereotypes; the woman is ambitious and takes a chance, while the man wants only to have a child and safe career. Tena’s character is more complicated and has a richer, more interesting interior life than we’re usually allowed to see in films.

During the Q&A following the screening, the actress said she liked her character’s sense of independence and sexual freedom. Too often women’s roles in films were reduced to “prostitutes and mothers and secretaries,” she told the audience. “That’s not the reality, at least not with me and my friends.”

10.000 km, released by Broad Green Pictures, opened Friday, July 10.

Alicia Vikander Stars As World War I Feminist and Pacifist in James Kent’s ‘Testament of Youth’

Director James Kent: “People offer me these projects and I’m immediately intrigued by the woman’s story in history because often I think women are written out of in history because they are the underdogs. Often it’s a better story than the one who’s king; he’s got it all his way. “

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

Featuring an interview with director James Kent

Alicia Vikander, who recently embodied female robotic perfection in Ex Machina, stars in James Kent’s circa 1914 drama Testament of Youth. The movie is adapted from the World War I memoirs of British pacifist and feminist Vera Brittain, who spoke for her generation when she chronicled her wartime struggles and losses. Brittain, contrary to the wishes of her family and what was expected of women at that time, pursued an Oxford education instead of a husband. Instead she fell in love with her brother’s friend, Roland (Kit Harington from Game of Thrones), and deferred her education to serve as a nurse on the French War Front. Sweepingly romantic and seemingly old fashioned on the surface, the feistiness and determination of the heroine gives the story a modern kick.

Vikander is having a moment, and the director, making his feature film debut, lucked out in his timing. At a recent press event to promote the film, he told me that if he had cast Vikander now he wouldn’t be able to afford her. The Swedish actress first came on everyone’s radar as Denmark’s queen in A Royal Affair, while the sci-fi Ex Machina propelled her to the next level. She seems to be everywhere with at least five other films scheduled for release this year. She will soon appear with Eddie Redmayne in Tom Hooper’s highly anticipated film, The Danish Girl.

Vikander is dating Michael Fassbender, whom she met when they made The Light Between Oceans, also scheduled for release this year. The 26-year-old actress was staying at the same hotel where she and the director were promoting the film. Now with her sudden celebrity, paparazzi circled outside the Crosby Street Hotel for hours in hopes of getting shots of Vikander and Fassbender leaving together.

Following are highlights from my interview with director James Kent about his film, his inspirations and especially his star:

Talk about the movie’s pacing and how you told the story.

James Kent: It’s not rushed, so you enter the film and you have these moments where you think, I’ve got a moment to think about what I’ve just seen. Otherwise it’s like plot, plot, plot, and you can’t stay in her head. And there’s a slightly reflective quality to the film that allows, hopefully, certain elements of the audience who get it to feel that it speaks to them singularly. Otherwise it could be boring.

Also I had never made a feature film. I made documentaries and television dramas, so this was my first feature I was obviously anxious to prove that I would be able to shed the televisual side, which is different, although it’s more cinematic now than it’s ever been. There’s a sort of different type of vernacular for television than cinema, and I wanted to make a film that felt like cinema.

You didn’t get the memo that audiences don’t want to see female heroines in film?

I didn’t get that memo and you know what, I think cinema isn’t getting the memo either at the moment. There’s Far From the Madding Crowd. There’s going to be the Suffragette movie. There’s Brooklyn with Saoirse Ronan and Mad Max: Fury Road starring Charlize Theron. I think, finally, they are waking up to the fact that most of the audience is actually women.

This is your first narrative film, but you’ve made television movies featuring women, including Maggie about Margaret Thatcher. Are you especially drawn to woman protagonists?

People offer me these projects and I’m immediately intrigued by the woman’s story in history because often I think women are written out of in history because they are the underdogs. Often it’s a better story than the one who’s king; he’s got it all his way. What’s a better story than Joan of Arc? And I also happen to be a gay man and I think that gay men also are underdogs, so maybe there’s a connectivity I feel is there between myself and the women’s experience. I also think women are much more psychologically alert and emotionally alert.

World War I is not an especially known subject for Americans. Were you concerned it would find an audience here?

It was a challenge, but what I’m hoping is that the power of Vera’s story and her pioneering spirit, which is largely in a love story but beyond that because Roland dies, it’s about a woman who powers herself and inspires herself to do what she always wanted to do, which is to become a writer. I think that’s a universal story. That’s not a World War I story.

Also the way I filmed it–because it’s filmed in a very subjective way–it’s very much her interior mind, and I think that modernizes that story. It’s not a 100-year period film. It’s a story about love and loss and rebuilding. You could have done that in modern dress.

You have a wonderful supporting cast but your star, Alicia Vikander, is basically the whole film. Your timing couldn’t be better. You got her right after A Royal Affair and Anna Karenina and before Ex Machina. She has about five other films coming out this year.

What can I say? It’s her film. We were fated. God smiled on us. Alicia Vikander was free, available, affordable, willing. And it was my first film! What more could a first film director want? And then to have her and then to have Taron Egerton, who’s in Kingsman, also on the rise. And Kit Harington, who’s in Game of Thrones, phenomenally successful, but all fresh, all not seen in the cinema world by big English language audiences.

I think Alicia produces a very specific Vera. There’s a sort of gritty determination, powerhouse there. You know she was a ballerina with the Swedish Royal Ballet from the age of 9. Now think of Black Swan. There’s a particular kind of girl who has that fortitude to be a dancer. They’re ambitious. They’re also very determined. And they set themselves the highest standards. And that’s what Vera did, and I think Alicia immediately focuses us on those qualities. An actress, what they do is they allow the audience to immediately focus on a particular aspect of that person that the film’s about. Another actress will alter that. It doesn’t mean they won’t do a great role, but you’ll have a different impression of that person. Alicia brings out some of the core qualities of Vera really within the first few seconds of meeting her. You know. You sense because that’s what Alicia’s like.

The scenes where Vera and her brother and Roland and a friend are bathing in the pond are particularly effective because of what happens later to all of them. Were the water scenes as much fun to shoot as to watch?

There was no joking around. That water was 8 degrees. And we’re talking February in England. I mean that was a lot of production panic because of my desire to have them in the water. Luckily we shot that part late because we didn’t want to kill off our actress. But she has no body fat. I mean her body double for the close-ups, she could stay in there. But Alicia because she’s so slim, that water went straight to her bones and so she was in and out. She never complained. Incredible.

You came into the project rather late, in 2012 when there was already a script in place. Did you make major changes?

It shifted. My agent told me as a first time film director I would only have a certain element of power. If it goes well, the second film you’ll have a lot more power. And that’s how it works. You desperately want the film to happen. I’m also in love with the script and it so happened coincidentally a great friend of mine, Juliette Towhidi, had written the script, so I did love the script but there were things that I wanted changed. I wanted more internalizing on the script, more subjectivity from her viewpoint. I wanted the War to be clarified. I didn’t want to stint on the warfare and the suffering that the audience would have but I didn’t want it to be too much either.

The love scenes are so understated, which makes them even sexier. What inspires you?

I’m quite good at romance. Some of my television projects are about romance and I’m very good at asking actors to do follow my direction that less is more, but to do it with their eyes, and with their mouth, and with their hands. Like that scene in the café, where they touch fingers, that was straight out of David Lean’s Brief Encounter for me.

I was very inspired by that movie. That’s a movie with Celia Johnson and she has this sort of internal voice and it’s like a close up and it’s all about trains and separation. These are the things Testament has in it and I love the lavish amount of romanticism of Brief Encounter. It was radical for its time to do that, to have internal voices and the way it’s shot. It’s just so radical, and I found that inspiring.

What I do, I try desperately to look for film references because you’re trying to give your crew and actors something to watch and say, “Look, it’s got a semblance of this.” I find it really hard to find things that I love. I love movies but I find it really hard to find something specific for the one that I’m making, but that came closest. And also as you can tell, a bit of Gone With the Wind. Because I think there’s also something about Vera and Scarlett O’Hara, there’s something about her feistiness, she won’t be told what to do by men.

Lauryn Hill Performs Signature Nina Simone Numbers at New York Premiere of ‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’ at the Apollo

Earlier on the red carpet, I mentioned to Garbus that Nina Simone is having a moment. Gina Prince-Bythewood has her protagonist sing “Blackbird” in ‘Beyond the Lights’ and Simone’s music seems to be getting a new audience as well. Garbus said, “It’s very interesting. You know I can’t explain that. I was in Starbucks this morning for half an hour and what was playing was Nina Simone. I guess we just needed her.”

S. Epatha Merkerson, Atallah Shabazz, Liz Garbus

This guest post by Paula Schwartz previously appeared at Showbiz 411 and is cross-posted with permission.

Lauryn Hill’s rousing performance following the screening of What Happened, Miss Simone? Monday evening at the Apollo Theater turned into a celebration and tribute to the genius and artistry of the musician/activist Nina Simone. The sensational evening was presented by Netflix and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. (The documentary will air on Netflix on Friday, June 26.)

Hill, who first performed at the Apollo at age 13 where she was booed for singing “Who’s Lovin’ You” off key, got a very different reception last night.

Dressed in a white halter-top and flared pants, Hill looked terrific, and even channeled the legendary singer; her outfit resembled an outfit Simone wore in a legendary performance featured in the documentary directed by Oscar nominated filmmaker Liz Garbus (The Farm: Angola, 1998).

Hill’s voice was raspy from some ailment mentioned by producer Jayson Jackson in his introduction before her set, but that that only made her voice sound even more like Simone’s baritone. In her nearly 50-minute set, Hill danced and swayed and sang signature Simone numbers.

The former Fugees singer opened with a moving rendition of “Ne Me Quitte Pas” and followed up with a dynamic version of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” She sang backed up by a full orchestra that included lush sounds of string instruments.

There were problems with the sound mix and some failed starts and stops, but Hill is a perfectionist and demanding bandleader and it all finally came together. For her next number she enthused, “We goin’ try to rap with this,” and Hill performed a new rap song inspired by Simone’s music.

Afterward she introduced the terrific Jazmine Sullivan with, “She can sing for the both of us tonight,” and added, “Watch this!”

Sullivan launched into Randy Newman’s 1977 song “Baltimore,” a tune Simone memorialized, which with Baltimore’s current problems could have been written today: “Man, it’s hard just to live. Oh, Baltimore. Man, it’s hard just to live, just to live.”

The song is included in a Simone tribute album timed to be released in conjunction with the documentary, which includes artists Hill, Common, Usher, Mary J. Blige, and Simone’s daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, a singer who also appears in the documentary and provides some of the film’s most poignant moments and insights into her mother’s life and career.

After Sullivan’s performance, Hill returned and ended on an even higher note, with her take of “African Mailman.” The long instrumental showcased the band with solos by the drummer, violinist, and backup singer. But the program was all about Lauryn Hill and her channeling of Simone, and despite the crowd’s stomping and cheering as the show ended its nearly hour-long set, there was no encore.

As suggested by the title, What Happened, Miss Simone? the documentary portrays a musical genius, but also a troubled artist who often fell on hard times. Driven by her art and social activism, and constrained by racism and her own inner demons – Simone was diagnosed late in life with bipolar disorder – she was also controlled by an abusive husband/manager Andrew Stroud, a former cop. He furthered her career but also beat her. There are archival segments of the couple together and present-day interviews with Stroud, who did not attend the premiere. (Simone’s daughter, who is promoting her new album, also did not attend.)

Notable celebrities at the premiere included grandchildren and friends of Simone, along with her longtime musicians Al Schackman, Lisle Atkinson and Leopoldo Fleming. Atkinson, a bass player who played with Simone for five years, told me her legendary tantrums and difficulty as a performer were exaggerated and he never had a bad moment on stage with her. He told me he believed she would want to be remembered for her music.

Schackman, a guitarist with perfect pitch, performed with Simone throughout her career and his astute comments and obvious love and esteem for Simone provide for some of the film’s most perceptive and informative moments.

In her introduction from the stage to the film, Garbus thanked Netflix and all the contributors to the documentary and related a story from Simone’s memoir. “Friends say I might have trouble with the crowd here because the Apollo is well known for giving artists a rough time,” read Garbus from Simone’s notes. “And I’m well known for the same to audiences.” The audience laughed. “So the two of us getting together was looked at as a kind of championship boxing match with the Apollo as the champ and me as the contender. In the end we fought to a draw.”

From the time she was a girl of 3, Nina Simone aspired to be the first Black classical pianist. “That was all that was on my mind,” she said in an interview in the doc, where in archival footage she famously said of her political activism that often got her into hot water, “I don’t think you have a choice. How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?”

Earlier on the red carpet, I mentioned to Garbus that Nina Simone is having a moment. Gina Prince-Bythewood has her protagonist sing “Blackbird” in Beyond the Lights and Simone’s music seems to be getting a new audience as well. Garbus said, “It’s very interesting. You know I can’t explain that. I was in Starbucks this morning for half an hour and what was playing was Nina Simone. I guess we just needed her.”

Speaking of her inspiration for the doc, Garbus said, “I’m a conduit to bringing her to audiences that didn’t know her before or giving her audience who loved her a little more of her. That’s a wonderful position to be in.”

The director noted that Simone is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century who had 15 ways of singing the same song. When she undertook the project, Garbus told me she didn’t know Simone’s personal life: “But of course as soon as I started to peel away layers of that I was even more committed and desirous of bringing her story to the screen.”

As for what Garbus hopes audiences take away from seeing the film, she told me on the red carpet, “I want them to listen to her music all over again and for that listener it will be a delicious experience because you’re going to know what this woman went through and what she was bringing to that music.”

Celebrities who attended the premiere included John Leguizamo, Sandra Bernhard, S. Epatha Merkerson, Usher, Gina Belafonte, Ilyasah Shabazz, and D.A. Pennebaker.

Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from “The Artist.” Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.

Director Diane Bell Chats about ‘Bleeding Heart’ Stars Jessica Biel and Zosia Mamet

During the festival I met with Bell at a restaurant in the Meatpacking district to chat about her film and following are edited highlights:

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

Bleeding Heart, written and directed by Diane Bell, stars Jessica Biel and Zosia Mamet as two sisters who have never known each other. Biel plays May, a reserved and disciplined yoga instructor who has enlisted a private investigator to help her track down her long-lost biological sister, Shiva (Mamet). She discovers her younger sister is a prostitute in an abusive relationship with a boyfriend who is also her pimp. May feels protective and driven to rescue Shiva from her chaotic and dire financial and personal situation.

Bleeding Heart begins as a character study of two very different women and turns into a revenge thriller. The movie features two strong female roles by actresses who are usually typecast. A deglamorized Biel get a chance to show of her acting range instead of coasting on her looks, while Mamet is convincing as a hooker with a heart of gold trapped in a toxic relationship, a role world’s away from the whiny, privileged Shoshanna she plays in Girls.

The cinematography is particularly beautiful, especially in an early scene where May is practicing yoga and her body is framed by a gorgeous Los Angeles sunrise. In a shot that feels like it could only be directed only by a woman, the camera pans over every part of Biel’s body as she does her yoga routine and rather than sexualizing her, reveals her strength and power, something May is not even aware of at that moment.

Bleeding Heart recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, which screened 119 features, of which only 30 were by women filmmakers. Bleeding Heart was one of 12 narrative films by women directors screened. This is an improvement over the previous year but not good enough. (Biel, who is married to Justin Timberlake, had just given birth to a baby boy and was unable to make the movie’s premiere at Tribeca.)

During the festival I met with Bell at a restaurant in the Meatpacking district to chat about her film and following are edited highlights:

Talk about the opening shot of the film, where Jessica is practicing yoga and the sun rises. The camera focuses on different parts of Biel’s body and it feels like only a woman filmmaker could get a shot like this.

This is why we need more female filmmakers, because it’s a different perspective. Everyone’s got a different perspective, and we have different stories and different ways of looking at the world. I feel that the stories we have on film just don’t reflect our reality; they also create it. They also change how we see things.

I was very blessed with Jessica that when she got onboard the film she probably had about three months in which she completely immersed herself in the yoga practice.

Jessica hadn’t done much yoga before the film?

She’d done some yoga but like I was very specific with this film that she’s an Ashtanga Yoga practitioner, which is what I taught and which I practiced, so she immediately started practicing Ashtanga every single day. And she started working out in the gym. She completely committed to it and she became vegetarian, and she went the whole way with it.

The thing that’s different with Ashtanga than with other kinds of yoga is you do a self-practice. You learn the sequence of positions and you do them. So when she came to shoot it she knew the sequence… I’ve done it every day for 15 years or something. We knew what it was that we were doing. And I think the thing that really comes across in those scenes is her level of concentration. She’s in that zone.

And Zak (Mulligan) and I, my DP, was just phenomenal, and we knew the kind of lighting that we wanted. The film both starts and ends with that moment of dawn, of the sun coming up. Ashtanga yoga is typically practiced in the very early mornings so ideally you’re practicing from when it’s dark until when it’s light. And that was something that was really important to me, so in the opening sequence it goes back and forth between her teaching a class and also her doing her own practice. When she’s doing her own practice, it’s just that cool light of like pre-dawn, before the sun comes out when it’s a little bit blue. And then when she’s teaching, it’s light and it’s just past the sun coming out. And that’s typically what Ashtanga teaches.

Jessica Biel is usually typecast, especially in roles that focus on her looks and being sexy. In the film she hardly wears makeup and her hair is pulled back in a simple ponytail. Were you worried she’d be able to pull this off?

My concern when she was suggested was that she’s so glamorous. My impression was that she’s so perfect and glamorous and I didn’t think she’ll be able to do this, you know, and the first thing she said to me when I met her was, “I understand May because everybody thinks my life is perfect, but I’m a human being.” I asked her if she would be happy to have no make up and she said, “100 percent.”

What was your production schedule?

We shot the film in 19 days, 12 hours a day normally. As a director I will not go over time. It’s not fair to cast. 12 hours a day is plenty for everybody, and I’m absolutely rigorous, being lucky in both my films working with great first ADs, and then just absolutely rigorous about just keeping it going and keeping that momentum and getting our days every day.

Talk about the chemistry between Zosia Mamet and Jessica Biel since that is crucial for the story since it focuses on their relationship.

Everybody connected and bounded very quickly. And I think a lot of friendships came out of the film. I know Zosia and Jessie became really close. They didn’t know each other before, but the moment they met, and this is one of those things, you just say, “Oh my God, I’m so lucky!” They really clicked. They somehow brought out something great in each other. On set, as human beings too, they just had that connection. They were just like sort of goofy together. There were lots of laughs and you could see they had a bound.

Did you test them together?

No. The funny thing about that sort of chemistry between people, like I feel the movie is partly a love story. It’s about these two women falling in love with each other. And I knew it had to have that chemistry. It’s just like a love story. There’s got to be that sort of spark and I feel they really had it. I felt it every day on set. The two of them together are so charming and sweet and funny.

In the film their characters are both controlled by men although in different ways. Shiva’s boyfriend is her pimp, and he is violent and abusive, while May’s partner is gentle and good to her, but he also tries to control her life. Talk about that.

It was just something that I was interested in. There’s explicit violence and then there’s sort of like another kind of violence, which is sort of implicit.

May’s boyfriend wouldn’t identify himself as being a controlling person and would hate to think of himself as that, and she wouldn’t think of herself as being in that relationship, but that’s what they are. Those are the mechanisms of their relationship and that was definitely something I kind of wanted to say of these two women. They’re two opposites, yin yang, but they’re really the same.

In the production notes it says you are fascinated by violence. What do you mean?

There’s so much of it in our society. How do we actually deal with it? I don’t like violence at all. I absolutely detest it. I’m a complete pacifist. And for me one of the questions driving this film from my perspective was, okay, if you’re completely committed to peace, it’s easy to be peaceful if everyone around you is peaceful. It’s super easy, it’s great. But what if you have to deal with somebody who’s really violent? How far do you go to help someone, protect someone from someone who’s really violent?

In our society domestic abuse and the murder of women by spouses or boyfriends are epidemic. And it’s something we don’t want to talk about. I looked up the actual statistics of it before coming here because I thought, I better get it right. In my head I thought it was about 30 women a month are killed in America by their partners right? That was the figure I had in my head. I looked it up. It’s really three women a day. On average spouses or ex-boyfriends are killing three women everyday. That’s an epidemic!

What is your next movie?

The next one I’m going to shoot in July. We’re Crowdfunding right now in a totally off the grid way. It’s a micro-budget movie. It’s called Of Dust and Bones. It’s about a widow of a war journalist and her husband was killed in Syria. She had decided to just retreat from the world. She lives a monastic kind of life in the desert where she wants no part of what she views as this crazy world, basically. Then her husband’s best friend and colleague, Alex, who actually sent her husband to Syria, comes to visit her. He has come with an agenda. He wants the rights to her dead husband’s last photographs. She feels very strongly that there’s no hope to be good in this world and every time we try to make things better we actually end up making things worse creating more suffering. The film is about what unfolds between them in the desert over these days. It’s these two wildly different viewpoints clashing.

See also at Bitch Flicks: “Vive La Revolution!” by Diane Bell

Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from “The Artist.” Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.

Mo’Nique Returns to the Spotlight in ‘Bessie’

The film also focuses on the relationship between Smith and Ma Rainey, who mentored Smith and gave her guidance on developing her stagecraft. Mo’Nique portrays Ma Rainey, known as the “Mother of the Blues,” in a rich and layered performance and has so much charisma she steals every scene she’s in.

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

Queen Latifah was born to play the Empress of the Blues. Queen Latifah stars in Bessie, the new biopic about the early life of legendary blues singer Bessie Smith. The film will premiere Saturday on HBO. Mo’Nique, who has her first stand out role since Precious, reminds us why she won the Oscar in 2010.

Directed by Dee Rees (Pariah) from a screenplay by Rees, Christopher Cleveland, and Bettina Gilois, the story is by Rees and acclaimed playwright Horton Foote, who died in 2009. The film focuses on Smith’s early years as she struggled as a young singer to eventually become one of the most successful recording artists of the 1920’s. She earned $2,000 a week – an unheard of sum – at the height of her career.

Both Queen Latifah and Mo’Nique received Critics Choice nominations the other day and the Golden Globes and other accolades are sure to follow.

The cast includes Michael Kenneth Williams (Boardwalk Empire, 12 Years a Slave) as Bessie’s husband; Khandi Alexander (Scandal) as Bessie’s abusive older sister, Viola; Mike Epps (The Hangover) as the singer’s bootlegger romantic interest; Tory Kittles (True Detective) as Bessie’s older brother Clarence; Tika Sumpter as Lucille, Bessie’s longtime lover.

At the recent premiere at the Museum of Modern Art, nobody worked the red carpet harder than Mo’Nique, who talked to all the journalists clamoring for her attention.

Bessie has many explicit sex scenes and Queen Latifah’s character has a nude scene that’s integral to the story but sure to get audiences talking. Ma Rainey was gay and Bessie Smith was bisexual, and the film doesn’t shy away from showing scenes of their characters having sex with both men and women. A standout is a scene early in the film where Mo’Nique and Queen Latifah dress up in drag, smoke cigars and do a song together to a boisterous audience.

Here’s a red carpet interview with Mo’Nique, who looked terrific in a blue lace gown, and was warm and thoughtful in her replies to all the journalists:

Were gay women who performed on stage more open about their sexuality in the time of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith? (Of course they didn’t have to contend with social media.):

Mo’Nique: I think back then there was a strength that said I’m unwavering about who I was born to be. Don’t we still fight with it today? But figure what she had to walk through then? It was illegal. They got locked up. If you were seen with the same sex so to have that kind of strength back then is absolutely beautiful.

What was the key to finding her character?

Mo’Nique: Her music, (I found it) through her music. If you listen to Ma Rainey you’ll really understand Ma Rainey because she sang from her soul. She sung her truth and that’s how I really got to understand who that woman was because there’s really very little written information about this woman. She’s so hidden and now history, you have to dig really deep to get that little bit…. And she told the truth. And even back then, she was fighting for wage equality, so we’re still having that fight today but definitely she kicked open the doors so we can even go to the meetings to have those discussions.

They were friends. And she was Bessie Smith’s mentor and she was very motherly but she was that type of mother that knew when she had to let go and let that baby fly and go see it for herself. And when the bird flew back home she was right there waiting for her. That’s what that relationship what. And what I so appreciate about her, we don’t often times see those relationships anymore, you don’t see it where two friends go through it, they fall out, but they’re still willing to love each other through it and come back together.

What does she see as Ma Rainey’s influence on A&R and jazz?

Mo’Nique: It’s truthful. It’s very honest. It’s very from the soul. When you listen to those singers back then, they couldn’t pretend. They couldn’t fake it because the people would know it and they were those singers that when you sat there, you know how they say music moves you? That was that type of music that moved you and made you make a decision, may it be the right, wrong or indifferent, but when you listen to that music it was like you know what? OK, “I’m gonna finish this darn liquor and I’m gonna make a change.” That’s what that music was back then. Absolutely beautiful!

What were the key factors that made her want to take on the role of Ma Rainey?

Mo’Nique: It was Ma Rainey’s strength. Her integrity. You know when you read that script and you understand that the sacrifices that woman made for little girls like us, and she had no idea that she was doing it, it was just the right thing to do. So when you read those lines, and you understand that that woman is talking to me for me, off the pages, and she’s saying Monique keep pushing. Keep going in the right direction and don’t waver from what you know is right. Look at my story and when you look at that woman’s story it’s not like most of our stories, where we die broke, alone, miserable. When you look at her story she had a very full life.

Before she made her way into the theater, I asked Mo’Nique if she actually sang.

Mo’Nique: All day long!

Later at the after party I asked the 36-year-old director about how she discovered Bessie Smith’s music, she told me it was through her grandmother: “She played Bessie Smith’s records all the time.”

Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from “The Artist.” Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.

Carey Mulligan on Her Feminist Character in ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’

Following are highlights from the press conference with Carey Mulligan, where among other things, she talked about her character, her collaborative work with her co-stars and director, the elaborate costumes, and how expert she became handling sheep.

Carey Mulligan (photo by Paula Schwartz) — Carey Mulligan. (Photo by Paula Schwartz)

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

Carey Mulligan took time off last week from her duties in the Broadway revival of David Hare’s 1995 drama, Skylight, to promote her new film, Far From the Madding Crowd, based on the 1874 Thomas Hardy novel. In Skylight, for which Mulligan just earned a Tony nomination, the English actress plays Kyra, a teacher in an urban London school who struggles to be independent and lead a life of purpose when her former, much older lover, a wealthy restaurateur (Bill Nighy), tries to worm his way back into her life after his wife dies.

In Far From the Madding Crowd, Mulligan plays Bathsheba Everdene, a country girl who inherits her uncle’s farm, and takes a crash course in how to shear sheep, plant crops and run a manor. Bathsheba’s last name sounds familiar because it inspired the naming of the feminine heroine of The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen. Like Katniss, Bathsheba is willful and independent. When she’s forced to behave in ways contrary to her nature, Bathsheba also wears elaborate costumes, with corsets and cinched waists that restrain and confine her and seem fetishistic.

Despite the different historical periods, the women Mulligan plays in Skylight and Far From the Madding Crowd, also have similar concerns; they are complicated, ambitious and brainy women who struggle to find their identity and place in the world, even as men and society try to control them.

Directed by Thomas Vinterberg with a script by David Nicholls, the film fixes on the darkness and perversity just below the surface of restrained and repressed Victorian life. Vinterberg – just as he showed in his last film, The Hunt – finds nature as beautiful and powerful as it is unfeeling and scary. Charlotte Bruus Christensen filmed the luscious, sun-soaked vistas of the English countryside, filled with enough sheep to make anyone consider becoming a vegetarian, particularly after one tragic sequence involving cliffs.

Practical, stubborn, smart, sharp-tongued – even irritating at times – Bathsheba struggles to be independent in a world in which a women’s life is circumscribed by society and custom. While marriage isn’t even on her radar, Victorian society pushes her to find a husband. Soon a trio of very different suitors, played by Matthias Schoenaerts, Michael Sheen and Tom Sturridge, propose marriage. Shocking in her day as much for her sex drive as for her independent lifestyle, Bathsheba chooses for love and desire rather than security or advancement. She is modern and relatable in her pursuits, drives, flaws and contradictions. She chooses the wrong guy when the right one is right under her nose.

Carey Mulligan and Matthias Shoenaerts. (Photo by Paula Schwartz)

Can you talk about how Bathsheba is unique for the time she’s living in?

Carey Mulligan: I’d never read the book. I still haven’t. When I read it, that’s what I was most excited about, that it was a story that started with a woman who turned down a proposal of marriage and a good one… a really good one in our film.

It’s a young woman in a Victorian classic that isn’t looking to be married and isn’t looking to be defined by a man. It hasn’t even crossed her mind. That’s what was so exciting. That’s obviously not the viewpoint of most women during that time and throughout the whole story, she sort of enjoys bucking social convention, being different. That’s who she is. There’s so much to her. She’s incredibly complicated and stubborn, fallible, spontaneous and impetuous and all these things mixed together.

Do you find that there’s a similarity between this character and Kyra Hollis, who you’re currently playing on Broadway?

There’s definitely a similarity between them. The thing about Bathsheba is that she’s so extraordinary in her time but Kyra isn’t that extraordinary in modern times – so I think it’s that Bathsheba feels so contemporary. They both have a real drive. Neither of them wants to be defined by men but both have the capacity to fall head over heels in love.

They’re both really strong yet flawed people, which is rare as an actress to get to play.

This kind of period romance has been done quite a bit. How did you make sure that the performance differed from others before it?

When you get to work with actors like this (she refers to her co-stars). There’s a certain security to that. Especially when you make an idiot of yourself. One of my improvisations with Michael was my interview to be a governess and he was the master of the house. It was the first time I was ever acted with Michael Sheen. It was terrifying and at the same time it was also brilliant because after that I could do anything in front of him and it wasn’t scary. The same (happened) with Matthias. All of that was good preparation.

Also, (there were) so many long conversations with Thomas Vinterberg and David Nicholls. We had an awful lot of time in comparison with other projects I’ve done and we were able to hash things out over and over and over again. [Laughs] I was really annoying and we came to a point where we were on set and it was a complete collaboration between all of our ideas for the story and what we wanted to do.

Carey Mulligan. (Photo by Hosoki Nobuhiro)

This is a character with so many sides to her. How do you think that was reflected in the clothing, hair and makeup choices?

That was a conversation with Janet Patterson, our costume designer, and Charlie Rogers, who did the hair and makeup. Working with Thomas and working on David’s version of the story we never wanted it to feel like a buttoned up costume drama with people wearing outfits and looking uncomfortable. This was about real people. The way that Thomas shoots it’s all about the performances. The camera moves with you and it’s all very relaxed on set.

The makeup and the hair, because we were outside all the time, it couldn’t get ruined immediately by being outside. It had to be durable and functional as well.

Skylight has been on hiatus for a week while you promote the film. Can you speak about taking a break from the show to do press?

We had a hiatus from Skylight so that we could do press in London. That was just the generosity of the producers. They knew well in advance when this film was coming out and we’re all so excited about it and proud of it that we wanted to be able to really do some good press junkets [Laughs].

It’s just a headspace break I suppose. When you do a play, you do it for a long run, I took it as an opportunity to take a break from the play and enjoy hanging out with these guys. Then coming back to the play, you kind have more energy in a way because you’ve been away from it for a week because plays can get a bit relentless.

How modern was life on set? Did you stay immersed in the time period between takes?

No, I took it with me like you take your homework home and tried to learn my lines for the next day. (Laughs) I’m not a method actor. When you’re in every day you feel a sort of weight of responsibility playing a very famous character, you obviously are thinking about it a lot but it wasn’t a character thing that I was carrying with me… We used our phones on set sometimes. [Laughs]

You’ve been very discerning about the characters you’ve built and brought to life. Bathsheba is a character who has influenced the modern kickass woman on film. Would you consider playing an action hero?

I don’t know. I would never say never to anything. The decisions I’ve made over the last couple of years have been driven by the characters and by the script and by the director. This was a perfect marriage of all of those things. I wasn’t really looking to do another period drama. I’ve done a lot of films that have been period recently and I did a lot of Austen (Pride and Prejudice) and Dickens (Bleak House) when I was younger. This was too good an opportunity not to work out.

I don’t rule anything out. I just think I’m always drawn to really strong characters, particularly characters who have a lot to them. I’m not really interested in playing two-dimensional people. But I think what’s amazing about Bathsheba is how complex and complicated and mixed up and strong and resilient. She’s so many different things in one, and that’s what I’m driven by and looking for and if that came along in the form of some action hero, then of course that would be great… But it might not.

Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from “The Artist.” Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.

‘The Wolfpack’ Brothers Walk the Red Carpet at the Tribeca Film Festival

Six brothers spent their lives cloistered inside a messy Lower East Side tenement in Manhattan where only their father had the key. Only once or twice a year were they allowed outside their claustrophobic apartment, subsidized by welfare checks their mother received from home schooling them. They spent the day watching movies. This went on for years and years. This is not the subject of some horror film. It’s a stranger-than-fiction story that is the subject of documentary, ‘The Wolfpack.’

Wolfpack director Crystal Moselle — *The Wolfpack* director Crystal Moselle

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

Directed by Crystal Moselle, the documentary created a stir at Sundance where it premiered, where the brothers turned up for the screening but spoke very little with the press.

Last weekend, The Wolfpack made its New York premiere at the TriBeCa Film festival at the SVA Theater on 23d Street, not so far from where the boys spent almost all their lives inside the closed walls of their claustrophobic and unkempt apartment.

Everything that the six boys – whose surname is Angulo – knew of the world they gleaned from movies. Quentin Tarantino’s movies were favorites, along with those of Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, and David Lynch. The boys – Govinda, Bhagavan, Narayana, Krisna, Jagadesh, Mukunda – spent their time watching movies and then reenacting scenes wearing costumes they created out of thrift shop clothes they retooled to resemble that of their characters.

One of the brothers described their existence as living in a prison. One sibling said they lived inside their minds.

As they got older, once or twice a year the siblings would walk in the streets. It was on one of their rare expeditions that Moselle found them. The production notes from the film said it was like “discovering a long lost tribe.” They were a vision in their waist-length hair and Pulp Fiction-inspired wardrobe, which featured a badly fitting dark suit, white shirt, and sunglasses. Over five years, Moselle gained their trust and recorded their story. She is still very protective of them.

On the red carpet, I asked the director if the boy’s father, Oscar, a Peruvian immigrant, who in the film was often drunk and ranted incoherently, had emotionally abused his sons. She replied tersely, “I’m not going to answer those questions.”

Moselle described her relationship with the brothers as sisterly, so they felt comfortable around her. (Their actual sister, to whom they are very close, is mentally disabled.)

“I watched them grow up,” Moselle told me. “There’s an incredible transformation that they went through so it was a beautiful thing to see this great transformation, and then now they’re making films in the world and socializing and happy people.”

Neither of the boys’ parents, including their mother Susanne, who seems as controlled as her sons in the film, appeared on the red carpet.

I spoke to Govinda, who is the second oldest and has a twin, what life is like now. “Life now is busy. It’s taken off cause this has pushed us to just start relationships with people, and in the filmmaking world it’s all about relationships,” he said like a pro.

“Offers are flowing in,” said the charismatic, handsome 22-year-old. “We’re starting our own production company, Wolfpack Productions. We’re working as assistants on sets, so there’s a lot happening for us. It’s opened up a lot of doors.”

The brothers still play out scenes from their movie scenes. “We’ll always do that,” Govinda smiled. “That’s the heart for us, so we’ll takes these movies with us wherever we go.”

They are still stunned by the Sundance success. “What could be more surprising and stupendous than that, the Oscars?” I asked. “You never know,” Govinda told me.

This red carpet stuff is something they’ve dreamed about since they were kids sitting on dirty mattresses watching movies, Govinda said. “This is something that we always dreamt about when we were 12 year olds and we’d turn on the TV and watch people on the red carpet and be like, ‘I want to do that some day! I want to be in front of those cameras some day and be on the red carpet!’”

The boys wore their signature outfits. “We actually thrift shop buy everything,” he told me. “We search around all New York City; we go to all the different stores and then we reference clothes from movies and this is like our Reservoir Dogs look.”

Soon, designers will be calling them and asking them to wear their suits, I told them. “That started already,” Govinda noted. They already have a fashion spread in the works. “We’re doing stuff with big magazines, so there’s a lot of talk in the works.”

Maybe because of years of being shut off from the outside world, the brothers’ speech is still a little off kilter, and Govinda speaks slowly and chooses his words carefully. I asked him how his parents were doing with all the media attention.

“They’re doing well. Dad’s more – he’s not a big public eye guy so he doesn’t like being in front of the camera and everything. You know how he was in the documentary, but mom is all for it.”

How did his Dad feel about the way he was portrayed? “We got a bunch of comments from people saying I wish I could do that to my children, in a joking kind of way,” Govinda laughed. “But my Dad, he loved the movie. The movie was an honest portrayal.”

Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from “The Artist.” Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.

‘Two Days, One Night’: Marion Cotillard’s Insight From the New York Film Festival

Cotillard did triple duty at the New York Film Festival Sunday to promote ‘Two Days, One Night,’ which had its U.S. premiere. (The film is Belgium’s submission for best foreign film.) At 1, in jeans and a casual but chic top, Cotillard participated in a Q&A for a standing-room crowd. At 3 she changed into Dior and walked across the street to Alice Tully Hall and joined the Dardenne Brothers as they introduced ‘Two Days, One Night’ to a sold out audience, and afterward participated in a Q&A.

This repost by Paula Schwartz appears as part of our theme week on the Academy Awards.

In Two Days, One Night, Marion Cotillard plays Sandra, a worker in a solar panel factory who returns to work after medical leave for depression to learn she has lost her job after management forces her co-workers to choose between keeping her on staff or receiving their 1,000-Euro bonuses. After the owner of the factory agrees to a revote, Sandra spends the weekend trying to meet with each of her 12 co-workers to plead her case and persuade them to change their minds.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the veteran filmmakers who wrote and directed the film, raise global issues like wage stagnation, financial inequality, and the declining middle class, while focusing their story on a financially strapped woman desperate to keep her job.

“She’s a simple woman and very complicated at the same time,” Cotillard explained at a Q&A Sunday. “She’s just recovering from a very deep depression and she’s fragile and she’s going to discover things about herself that she didn’t expect.”

Cotillard, who received an Oscar for disappearing into her role as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose, in which she affected the singer’s nasal warble and her sickly hunched over physicality, makes Sandra, in her tank top and with her weary eyes, just as believable. A rare combination of movie star and character actress, Cotillard chooses roles in high-profile Hollywood films like Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012), along with parts in foreign and independent films, notably Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone and James Gray’s The Immigrant, just to mention a few.

Cotillard did triple duty at the New York Film Festival Sunday to promote Two Days, One Night, which had its U.S. premiere. (The film is Belgium’s submission for best foreign film.) At 1, in jeans and a casual but chic top, Cotillard participated in a Q&A for a standing-room crowd. At 3 she changed into Dior and walked across the street to Alice Tully Hall and joined the Dardenne Brothers as they introduced Two Days, One Night to a sold out audience, and afterward participated in a Q&A. As soon as the discussion ended she glided along the red carpet in the lobby for photographers and posed for selfies with fans, some who got a bit too chummy and close, but she never flinched.

Six things I learned about Marion Cotillard Sunday during the Q&A.

The Dardenne brothers have a long rehearsal process and take lots and lots of takes, and the actress is fine with that:

“Sometimes we would have already done 70 takes and I would ask for more… because some were sequence shots, which have to be perfect because you cannot edit… I trust them (the Dardennes) a thousand percent, so if they would have asked me to do 200 takes I would have done it because I knew there was a reason behind this amount of takes, and that was one of my best experiences as an actresses. They really offered me everything that I had always wanted in terms of relationships with directors, and today when I talk about the amount of takes, I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, this is a lot,’ but on set it was never overwhelming, it was never exhausting, it was just the process of getting something, getting what they wanted to have, and for me giving them exactly what they wanted to have.”

On whether she worried about going too deep into a role and how hard it was for her to come back when the movie is over:

“For Piaf it was kind of difficult because it was the first time I went that deep, and I immersed myself entirely for months into somebody else’s… But I’ve learned a lot trying to get back to my life after La Vie en Rose, so now I know that I need a process to come back to my life, and this process is as interesting as getting into someone, and now it’s part of how I work.”

On how she prepared for celebrity:

“I don’t think you are prepared for this very real weird thing actually… But at the same time it, when you’re an actor you’re looking for a connection with a lot of people you might never meet, but you want to tell a story, and you want this story to touch many people as a kind of connection… When I started in acting and people recognized me in the street it was so weird, but I didn’t know how to take it so I would run away. That was super weird. I felt very paranoid. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. And I’m a very sensitive person, and sometimes it would be too much, but I’m kind of used to it. It’s just a different connection to people. (She laughed.) And I like it.”

She admits to being drawn to playing dark and difficult women with big problems. (Next up is Lady Macbeth.):

“Unfortunately yes. When they offered me the role of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, I said yes right away without my brain being involved in this decision, and then I started to think, and I was like, ‘Oh wow, yeah, here we go again. Drama! Drama! Drama!’ I must be, yeah, attracted to the darkness for sure. But sometimes I’m having very sane, not schizophrenic conversations with myself, but still conversations with myself, thinking when are you going to stop playing people who are so fucked up? And I have no answer. I’m just waiting for sudden light. It’ll come. It’ll come.”

She did have a brief but memorable appearance in Anchorman 2 starring Will Ferrell and directed by Adam McKay, but it seems she needed help loosening up:

“All these guys are my idols, so that was kind of crazy for me. When they asked me I didn’t even read anything, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, I’ll be there.’ I mean being on a set with Will Ferrell was a dream, and I was freaked out in that huge field, and Adam McKay was like super far away giving me lines, like new lines over this megaphone, I could barely understand what he was saying. Can I say that I was hungover? So it was part of me being in a disastrous state and at the same time having a lot of fun.”

She doesn’t think she was that great in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris:

“That was a tough experience for me actually because it took me a long time to actually believe that I was on a set with Woody Allen… I met Woody Allen five days before we started shooting, and we didn’t really exchange things. We discussed a little bit about the vision of this character, but I had very little information, and then being on set with him I was so scared that I wouldn’t be good enough… I was always scared that he wouldn’t get what he wanted because we had talked so little, and I think that I might have misunderstood what he wanted at the beginning, and I knew that he was not very happy, which does stay with me and so yeah, I felt very uncomfortable… It was not very easy for me either to be in front of an actress like an rabbit in the light (sic)… I’m very happy that I worked with him… I could have done better.”

Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from “The Artist.” Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.

Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke Praise Patricia Arquette’s Performance in ‘Boyhood’

Arquette, who is terrific as Olivia, turns in a nuanced and complex performance that is vanity free. We watch her age perceptively and slowly as her character gains wisdom but still falters. In other words, she’s the kind of three-dimensional woman we rarely see in American films.

This repost by Paula Schwartz appears as part of our theme week on the Academy Awards.

The stars of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood–Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, and Ellar Coltrane–age in real time in this one-of-a-kind nearly three-hour film. Boyhood, which was shot in short annual increments over a dozen years so the effect as you watch the actors change imperceptibly and slowly is like watching time-lapse photography.

This approach would come across as a gimmick or stunt if the movie wasn’t so good. The real magic of the film is that as you watch characters grow and age, you can’t help looking back and contemplating your own life changes.

The three stars and the director of Boyhood participated at a lively press conference recently at the Crosby Hotel in SoHo to promote the film. This marks Ethan Hawke’s eighth film with the director, whose most notable collaborations include the Before Sunrise trilogy and Dazed and Confused (1993).

Boyhood tracks the life of a full-faced pouty six-year-old, Mason (Coltrane) and his older, bratty sister, Samantha, played by Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter, as they grow up and mature. The story focuses on Coltrane’s character who evolves from boyhood to early manhood amid personal and family dramas, including family moves, family controversies, faltering marriages and re-marriages, new schools, first and lost loves, and good and bad times. Children of divorce, Mason and Samantha are raised by their beleaguered but devoted mother Olivia (Arquette), a hard-working woman with terrible taste in men, and her ex-husband, an immature man with a good heart but little sense of responsibility (Hawke).

Linklater described Boyhood as “this little collection of intimate moments that probably don’t fit into most movies. They’re not advancing the character enough or the story enough or the plot, but they all add up to something much bigger than each little place and each little piece of it, so that was kind of the feel to the whole movie, that it mirrors our lives.”

As to whether the film was an intimate character study or a sweeping family epic, the director said it was both. “It’s very specific and intimate but universal within that specific world. It could have been made in any country and any time. There’s such a commonality here.”

The cast and director of Boyhood — The cast and director of *Boyhood*

The film could just as accurately been entitled Motherhood or Fatherhood or Parenthood, Hawke said. He described it as “an epic about minutiae. That’s what it is. It’s difficult to title because of that. It’s a family seen through one boy’s eyes, so that title makes as much sense as any other.”

As for whether it was difficult for the actors to get back in character every year for the brief period they shot their roles, Coltrane explained, “It was a very long build up every year. We’d have a couple months to think about what we were doing and then a solid week of kind of work shopping and building the character and figuring out where the characters were that year, so by the time we got to filming we were kind of just already there.”

Hawke turned to Arquette during the press conference and told her, “I’m just throwing props your way. I’m surprised that people don’t write about more is that how awesome it is to see Patricia’s character be in this movie and to see a real woman who is a mother and a lover and more than one thing in a movie. I feel so proud to be a part of a movie that respects her character the way this movie does, and I feel it’s also sometimes so real and so true that you almost don’t ever see this in film,” he said. “It’s true in life. We see it all the time, but I don’t see that woman in movies. I don’t see her.”

“She’s in the background or just kind of in the background or ancillary elements to give some encouragement in some way to some scruffy guy. Olivia is a real, three-dimensional human being, and it was so exciting, and the women in my life who see the movie so appreciate it,” he said. ” She’s not just good, she does stupid things and smart things.”

He added, ” I just love her. You can’t pin down. One minute you go, oh she’s a good mother! No, wait, actually that was not a great decision. We’re used to people in movies being one thing, all the time.”

Arquette explained her acting technique. “In acting you have to get past your own head and your own ego and all of these fucking barriers and walls to just get to a place where hopefully you can be present enough in a scene with someone.” She added of the collaborative process, “I trusted the process. It was jumping into the void from the get-go, but when you’re in the right hands, and you jump into the void together, really great things can come of it.”

Ultimately, the director said, the movie “was always going to be a portrait of growing up but also parenting and aging. That you don’t quit growing up, especially once you’re a parent.” Hawke and Arquette’s characters are bumbling through parenting as this was happening in real life with the actors and director. “We had ourselves as parents,” Linklater said. “During this film we had five children born between us and that was just an ongoing part of life.” At the same time, “ You’re thinking of your parents once you’re a parent yourself.”

The movie mirrored what was happening in the lives of the actors and director. “We didn’t want anything to feel like it wasn’t earned or tethered to some sort of reality. I don’t think there’s anything in the movie that didn’t come out of my life or their lives,” Linklater said. His hope was that the film opened the audience up to the possibility of seeing the connection between their lives and that of the characters in the film. “Once you get to this thinking about life in general and your own life and loved ones and your own experiences, triggering all kinds of wonderful things I hope, painful and wonderful things.”

Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from “The Artist.” Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.